The Musings Of The Consensus

 I know, this likely would have been better said at the beginning of the month, but I needed to time to organize my thoughts on the subject, so here goes: 1. I want to cover more FOSS (free and open-source gaming) for ChristCenteredGamer. Used to be, Linux was the backfoot in gaming, but in recent years has been fighting hard to remedy that, and some FOSS games have turned out to be just as good if not better than their commercial counterparts. I intend to try covering more and more of these FOSS gems because I'm genuinely pleased with the strides that the community has taken to stand alongside the profit-based games developers. 2. I want to continue to evangelize for Christ If you read this blog, a few years ago, I was quite the heathen. Won't lie, my past still weighs heavily on me, and while I cannot escape it, nor will I shy from admitting it. Sin is my shackle like it is for everyone else on the planet, and while I still struggle against my own chains, I hope to help other...

 It's been awhile since news of the Steam Deck has been out, and I just wanted to share a few thoughts about it. First off, Valve claims to learned a few lessons from the SteamOS petering out, and the Steam Deck is apparently an application of learning a few lessons from that experience. The particular high points of what seems to be lessons learned I plan to note and comment on. 1. The system itself is rather expensive, especially if you spring for the $699 version, but given it intends to make most Steam games run on a portable system, the price is lower than I expected, though while I remain optimistic they learned some lessons on the hardware side of things, I plan to reserve judgment on whether the price is justified until release. 2. The Steam deck will be using an ARM processor specialized for gaming and a Linux distro based on Arch as its core, which, given the rolling release bleeding edge support for Wine/Proton Steam relies on for Linux gamers wanting to run Windows game...

As the title says, some enterprising soul made Windows 95 an application that runs in it's own window and runs Windows 95 natively, without the hassle of setting up a virtual machine. It can be found here if you're interested. Now, compared to a VM version, this one has some limitations. This is based on a pre-integrated Internet Explorer copy of Windows 95C, meaning it has the classic interface, no IE stuff. It cannot detect USB drives despite larval support for that being possible in the 95C version (admittedly, they are fluky on VMs too), and while a decent amount of pre-included software is added, you basically have to mount ISO images to add anything else. Regardless, it's impressive all the basics of Windows 95 work out of the box with no special tweaks. It does have some issues. It does not handle restarting the application well, and changing display settings can lock up the program. It's preconfigured to selected values, essentially a locked VM sandbox,...

While reading up on the cryptology profession, I noted some particularly facepalm-worthy things that made me laugh hard at the sheer fail, and since I've always considered history to be a rich mine of comedy, here are some of my favorite moments of utter fail in the cryptological arena of human history. Battle of Tannenburg - World War I was a pretty dumb war because everyone in it was fighting for some really narrow-minded objectives that clashed hard with reality, with the Russians having a reason that amounted to an alliance with France they should have ignored and a hurt ego they wanted to assauge, but they fought anyway and we got the USSR in replacement of the Tsars. In cryptology, they screwed up this major battle hard because they were lazy and sent messages in cleartext even though it was no secret the Germans were not ashamed to read other people's mail and this entire battle was an utter failure on their part because the Germans knew exactly what they were doin...

In a previous post, I created a computer-based cipher usable from a spreadsheet program , but that cipher only included letters. Below is an expanded version that also includes numerical ciphering capability. (with numbers 1-9, with 0 at the end) This one follows the same basic rules as the previous cipher, but with the punctuation marks not included. Letters can be placed where that would go, such as for commas, according to any additional rules the cipher maker wishes to specify if that is needed. The table below is again a sample set of tables that can be randomized and expanded as needed for security, so long as all the rules of the base cipher are still adhered to. While still reasonably secure, this cipher can be strengthened by having each row mix the numbers and letters at random on each line, as opposed to having the letters than numbers mixed as seen below. Otherwise, knowledge numbers are used to encrypt other numbers alone may provide a hint to break the cipher shield...

When I designed my spreadsheet cipher, I examined several classical cryptographic systems and decided I wanted to have many of their strengths and very few of their weaknesses while still leaving it easy for a single person to encrypt and decrypt. What my method does and does not have are the following. 1. No cipher block limit. The cylindrical cryptograph of Etienne Bazeries had twenty discs with twenty-five letters on the outer rim of the discs. Thomas Jefferson's wheel cypher had thirty-six discs with twenty-six letters on rims. The strip cipher of Parker Hitt had twenty-five discs and letters, though the non-cylindrical version could be enlarged with as many additional lines of ciphertexts whenever desired and the position of each ciphertext was not fixed like on the cylinder version. A common flaw in all these methods is the overreliance on the imposed limits. For example, the Hitt cipher could only decrypt twenty-five characters of any ciphertext before you had to use ...

I've been reading up on cryptology for a while, so I thought I'd try my hand at making a cipher of my own, just for fun. It's not anywhere as secure as modern-day cipher systems, my version is a modified variant that borrows elements from several classical ciphers that have fallen out of regular use, but that all said, I designed this cipher to be fairly secure and easily usable for anyone with access to a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc . Now, a little background. It's a polyalphabetic (uses more than one series of letters in several rows) substitution cipher with a key system similar to that used by the M-94 and M-138 that were the brainchild of US Army officers Joseph Mauborgne and Parker Hitt. My version uses an altered variant of the alphabet tables used by Blaise de Vigenere, but I otherwise want to avoid the security flaws of the Vigenere system. I also decided to take some hints from the one-time pad system, particularly the German...